THE provision in the Protection of Life
During Pregnancy Bill that no institution would be permitted to opt out
of providing medical termination of a pregnancy in the case of grave
danger to the life of a woman was considered "unnecessary".
It was "highly unlikely" that an institution would refuse to terminate in such circumstances, according to Minister for Health Dr James Reilly. He was explaining why that provision, which had been contained in the draft legislation, was dropped from the final Bill. And he added: "We see absolutely no indication or room for an institution to have a conscientious objection."
The Mater Hospital in Dublin is one of the country's major hospitals. It is a single member company of a parent company called the Mater Misericordiae and the Children's University Hospitals (Temple Street) Ltd.And the board of that company comprises the Sisters of Mercy and representatives of the Catholic Archdiocese of Dublin, the Catholic Nurses' Guild of Ireland and the Catholic charity, the Society of St Vincent de Paul.
Last week we learned what the exclusion of the original requirement to provide termination in designated state hospitals means in practice. One of the board members of the Mater, a Fr Kevin Doran, said: "The Mater can't carry out abortions because it goes against its ethos".
He added: "I would be very concerned that the minister sees fit to make it impossible for hospitals to have their own ethos."
Sr Eugene Nolan, Nurse Tutor at the Mater (who formulates the training given to all nurses there), endorsed Fr Doran's statement: she described the situation facing the hospital as "very, very grave" and added that legislation was "being imposed on it".
The Mater Hospital is part-owned by the Sisters of Mercy, and is managed by its own board, completely independently of the Health Service Executive. It is totally funded, however, by the taxpayer, on whose behalf the legislation was passed.
And now, although there was a rush of possibly embarrassed comment that the board has yet to consider the matter, it is obvious that the Doran statement is a shot across the bows of the new legislation.
When the Act designated the Mater as one of two Catholic hospitals not under HSE management which would be required to carry out abortions, that undoubtedly was requiring the hospital to operate under the law of the land, and therefore against its Roman Catholic ethos.
But no member of the board uttered any defiant public warning between the publication of the draft legislation and the enactment of the Bill.
(The other hospital is St Vincent's University Hospital in Dublin, part-owned by the Sisters of Charity, run by them independently of the HSE, and also funded by the taxpayer).
Once again, we
are being told that publicly-funded hospitals have a right to impose
their Catholic ethos on their patients, its dominant religious teaching
winning out over civil rights for all citizens.
The Mater
board, when it has considered the matter raised by Fr Doran, may feel
it is in a strong position to defy the law in defence of a "higher
ethos".
It is entitled to: but not with taxpayers' money.
(St Vincent's
Hospital, when asked last week to comment on the Fr Doran statement,
said that, as always, it would follow the law of the land.)
The problem lies with what would seem to be, among other things, the naivete of Dr James Reilly,
who apparently could not conceive of any Catholic institution trying to
get round the law, and allowed the only provision to prevent them
trying it to be deleted from the Act.
In itself, this trusting naivete
seems odd, as the entire bitter debate over the Bill was predicated on
Catholic belief that there was a moral imperative – their own perception
of the equal right to life of mother and child – which would impose a
duty on any Catholic to disobey a law which they believe to be against
this perception.
There is no question that both the Mater
and St Vincent's have an absolute moral and (thanks to the deletion of
the original clause in the draft legislation) arguably a legal right to
refuse to obey the provisions of the Protection of Life
During Pregnancy Act.
But if they do so, they must accept that they
have no right to any public funding, and must look to the resources of
the Catholic Church to keep them going.
A further
difficulty lies with the fact that, thanks to the provision which was
allowed to remain in the final Bill, providing for individual medical
personnel to opt out of taking part in abortion in any HSE hospital on
grounds of conscientious objection, seriously ill pregnant women are
once again in medical limbo.
The matter is made even more
alarming by the fact that even hospitals under the administration of
the HSE have ethics committees which almost without exception are
dominated by the Catholic church – and its teaching.
It is hypocrisy to
pretend otherwise.
(The exception is Tallaght, which by law is supposed
to incorporate the old liberal/Protestant ethos of the Adelaide into its
regulation.)
The Vatican thunderbolt uttered by Fr Doran
has one advantage: by once again focusing pro-choice thinking, which
may have been lulled into a false sense of security that the law is the
law, on the very real danger to pregnant women in this country.
Four
thousand woman annually will continue to travel to the UK to terminate
their pregnancies, almost always traumatically.
So now the pro-choice
lobby must stand up and point out that there is no safety for women in
this country if a pregnancy threatens their lives.
The
anti-abortionists have ensured that in pursuit of what they call the
"equal right to life of mother and child", the mother can be sacrificed
to the preservation of the foetus.
Once again, we are in the Dark Ages.